There has been a nostalgic resurgence in owning and riding the panhead style engine motorcycles. Anyone wishing to rebuild a panhead style engine will find that the rocker arm assembly was never designed to be rebuilt. In addition, all replacement rocker arm assemblies have a brass upper guide. The original rocker arm assemblies had a bronze upper guide. Unfortunately, the new brass upper guides do not last very long before they need to be replaced. In addition, the original panhead style rocker arm assemblies leaked oil and were known to be noisy. This resulted from the inability to adjust the rocker arm end play tolerance. Since the rocker arm assembly is at the end of the oil lubricating system for the engine, the leaky nature of the rocker arm assembly resulted in poor oil pressure. The poor oil pressure means that other components receiving oil did not necessarily receive proper lubrication, thus reducing the life of these components.
Thus there exists a need for an improved panhead style rocker arm assembly that overcomes these and other problems.